Body Check

Women who tend to judge their body based on how it looks may have a hard time monitoring their body's internal signals. Vivien Ainley and Manos Tsakiris, researchers at Royal Holloway University of London, asked 50 women to count their own heartbeat without taking their pulse—a way of testing awareness of one's physiological state. The women who were least accurate scored highest on tests of self-objectification (viewing the body in terms of looks instead of health and performance). Poor body awareness is linked to disordered eating, sexual dysfunction, and depression, Ainley notes. Other researchers have suggested that meditation may enhance overall body awareness, although they found that it did not improve heartbeat detection specifically.